Year one homesteading on three acres

As we embark on our 4th growing season on our homestead I thought it would be helpful to reflect on the projects we worked on in our first few years homesteading. We learned so many things our first year, and we really “hit the ground running” as soon as we could. It seems like we did so many things because we were breaking ground everywhere. Our property wasn’t used much at all before we bought it. Thinking back to it being mostly grass is mind boggling to think about these days. Note that we’re doing all of this on a shoe string budget, it’s rough and practical, definitely not pretty. Here’s a little bit of everything we did on our first growing season on the farm.

Buying property

Year one we bought a house on 3 acres, when you account for the house and the woods we have about 1 acre that we use for gardening and livestock. I’m glad we found a property with a house that was livable, it needs work, and we haven’t gotten around to most of the work to this day, but we’ll get there. Our house was actually an old elementary school back in the early 1900’s and it was turned into a house in the 70’s. So as you can imagine a lot of cosmetic changes need to happen eventually, but for now we love our home. We’re definitely investing in our livestock and garden way more than we’re investing in our home at this point.

Chicken farming

We started out with three chickens and after that things escalated. We bought and rescued a lot of hens that we’re already laying. In hindsight, I would not recommend buying laying hens, fast forward a couple years and we had 60 chickens and were only getting about half a dozen eggs a day. Start with chicks, and buy more each year, they’ll lay quicker than you’d expect! On the plus side, those old laying hens we originally bought made great soup when we gave up on their egg laying abilities.  We learned a valuable lesson too, just buy chicks and have some patience.

 

Impulse purchasing ducks

My husband saw 6 lonely ducklings at Tractor Supply and brought them home when I was 39 weeks pregnant. They were cute, but once they grew up they were a total nightmare. Our pasture was ridiculously muddy, our biggest chore was cleaning their pool daily. They were kind of violent with each other (Seeing ducks try to drown each other became a daily occurrence) and they pooped everywhere and then laid eggs in it. I wasn’t a fan, so we gave our ducks away that fall to a duck obsessed neighbor. Don’t impulse purchase animals at Tractor Supply.

Rugged chicken coop

We made a makeshift coop/barn. Our property included a very rustic old shed, it’s about the size of a one car garage. We used some old dog kennel panels to separate a section for our chickens. It worked great when chickens were our only livestock. The other side of the kennels was used as storage for feed and eventually an insulated apartment for our kittens.

Tilled garden

We wanted a large scale garden, so tilling was the way to go. Our first year the garden was pretty sizable, about 2500 square feet. We do have to fence our garden with tall 6 foot sections of fencing too or everything will be eaten by deer. We actually made our own fence posts with wood from the property and then attached a simple netting style fence. Our first year we had a good amount of produce like tomatoes, green beans, and squash. We were really happy with our first garden, because it was our very first real garden and we thought it was huge. We were really bad at managing weeds and the soil wasn’t perfect, but we still had a good season. The garden is something we improve on each and every year and it makes me so proud to see where we started and where we’re at now.

 

Fruit trees and berry bushes

We planted fruit trees and berry bushes our first year. The deer mowed down our cherry tree, but we still have a couple apple trees growing. We planted strawberries and blueberries in a section of our garden and it was hard to see that it was worth it in the first year, but they definitely paid off down the road. On our 3rd growing season we had more strawberries and blueberries than we knew what to do with. We made tons of jam and pies, our toddlers would head straight for the berries every time they were in the garden. When we planted those berry bushes one of those toddlers didn’t even exist yet and that’s pretty cool to think about. Everything you add to your homestead each year will benefit the next generation, even if they’re not around quite yet.

Barn cats

We needed a couple of mousers and found the best duo of sisters. Tsnuami and Anemone. You can tell my tween named them. I’m not really a cat person. I’m a dog person. We have three dogs and I never feel like that’s enough. Alas, I was surprised how much I instantly fell in love with these kittens. Cats might even be my favorite animals on the farm and these days we have lots of animals on the farm.

Bread from scratch

This might not seem like a huge deal, but we started making bread from scratch weekly. We don’t buy bread at the store anymore. We’re not into sourdough, I don’t love the upkeep and I’m honestly not even a fan of sourdough. So we make a standard white bread that’s so good for everything. We make 3 loaves at a time, which is great, because on baking day we’ll eat half a loaf while it’s still warm all slathered with butter. (I know you technically shouldn’t slice warm bread, but that’s an absolutely ridiculous rule if you ask me.)

Had our second daughter

We had our second daughter, Greeley, she’s obsessed with the garden as you can see in the photo below where she was having one of many garden naps in her stroller. Greeley is our rainbow baby and she brings so much sunshine into our lives. She makes me laugh every single day. Now that she’s almost three she’s itching to get back into the garden, she loves harvesting, snacking, and analyzing everything. I have a feeling we’ll be spending every single moment outside this summer, but for now we hibernate a little bit.

We learned so much our first year. It didn’t feel like we accomplished that much when it was happening, our to-do list was always growing and never shrinking. When I was looking back through all the photos I took back then to find some for this post I was so amazed to see how far we’ve come and how much we accomplished in our first year. I’m really proud of our growth. Every moment you homestead is really an investment for the future and we learn so much more every single season. I couldn’t be more proud to be raising our daughters here, teaching them valuable life skills that have skipped several generations.